Free To Choose: a personal Statement

What's Wrong with Our Schools?
155
of the federal government, so that it played no significant role.
The states mostly left control of schools to the local community,
the town, the small city, or a subdivision of a large city. Close
monitoring of the political authorities running the school system
by parents was a partial substitute for competition and assured
that any widely shared desires of parents were implemented.
Before the Great Depression the situation was already chang-
ing. School districts were consolidated, educational districts en-
larged, and more and more power was granted to professional
educators. After the depression, when the public joined the in-
tellectuals in an unbridled faith in the virtues of government, and
especially of central government, the decline of the one-room
school and the local school board became a rout. Power shifted
rapidly from the local community to broader entities—the city,
the county, the state, and more recently, the federal government.
In 1920 local funds made up 83 percent of all revenues of
public schools, federal grants less than 1 percent. By 1940 the
local share had fallen to 68 percent. Currently it is less than one-
half. The state provided most of the rest of the money: 16 percent
in 1920, 30 percent in 1940, and currently more than 40 percent.
The federal government's share is still small but growing rapidly:
from less than 2 percent in 1940 to roughly 8 percent currently.
As professional educators have taken over, control by parents
has weakened. In addition, the function assigned to schools has
changed. They are still expected to teach the three R's and to
transmit common values. In addition, however, schools are now
regarded as means of promoting social mobility, racial integration,
and other objectives only distantly related to their fundamental
task.
In Chapter 4 we referred to the Theory of Bureaucratic Dis-
placement that Dr. Max Gammon had developed after studying
the British National Health Service: in his words, in "a bureau-
cratic system . . . increase in expenditure will be matched by
fall in production. . . . Such systems will act rather like `black
holes' in the economic universe, simultaneously sucking in re-
sources, and shrinking in terms of `emitted' production."
11
His theory applies in full force to the effect of the increasing
bureaucratization and centralization of the public school system

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156
FREE TO CHOOSE: A Personal Statement
in the United States. In the five years from school year 1971–72
to school year 1976–77, total professional staff in all U.S. public
schools went up 8 percent, cost per pupil went up 58 percent in
dollars (11 percent after correction for inflation). lnput clearly
up.
The number of students went down 4 percent, the number of
schools went down 4 percent. And we suspect that few readers
will demur from the proposition that the quality of schooling went
down even more drastically than the quantity. That is certainly
the story told by the declining grades recorded on standardized
examinations. Output clearly down.
Is the decline in output per unit of input due to increasingly
bureaucratic and centralized organization? As some evidence, the
number of school districts went down by 17 percent in the seven-
year period from 1970–71 to 1977–78—continuing the longer-
term trend to greater centralization. As to bureaucratization, for a
somewhat earlier five-year period for which data are available
(1968–69 to 1973–74), when the number of students went up
1 percent, the total professional staff went up 15 percent, and
teachers 14 percent, but supervisors went up 44 percent.'